


Vices & Virtues

by ValentineRevenge



Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, Cutting, Drug Use, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-05 01:47:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ValentineRevenge/pseuds/ValentineRevenge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone has their own vices and virtues. The boys of Panic! know this all too well, but can they change that before it becomes fatal?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

In a town, there are always going to be vices and virtues. Sure, it's hard to see the vices in some of those tiny towns in the north, or the mid-west, and even harder to see the virtues in some of the large cities, like New York, or Las Vegas, where our story takes place. Any how you look at it, everywhere in this world has their own vices and virtues.  
  
In a sense, all people are the same. They all have their good parts and their bad parts, no matter how horrible they are, or where they're from. In Asian culture, it's "Ying and Yang". To Western culture, it's "Good vs. Evil". Any way you look at it, everything has these aspects. It's the most oft repeated theme throughout history. And how can it not be?  
  
There are some things that are simply universal, transcending language and gender, and even species. Among them are love, life, and never giving in, as well as loss, evil, family, frienship, and peace. How do you think that the Beatles became so popular? Their songs were based on these simple things. They probably saw it before we did.  
  
You see the grandmotherly lady in the corner, and you think she's pure. But what if I told you that she gambles away her social security check at the bingo hall, and used to abuse her now-grown children? Your view would change, wouldn't it?  
  
Now look at the killer spending the rest of his life in jail. You think that he deserves it, right? What if he's in there because when his wife was murdered, the killer went free? And that he'd been forced to take Justice into his own hands. What if before he was placed in here he was always the guy everyone went to with their problems, always willing to lend a hand? That's certainly something to think about, now isn't it?  
  
But today, our story of vices and virtues only entails the lives of 4 boys, each broken in their own way.

**Brendon**

  
here's always the high and low points in everything, especially life, but personally, I like to look more at the high points. There's no point in only focusing on the low, like Ryan or Jon, cause that'll just make you a miserable person. It's pretty easy to make yourself low, but not easy to bring yourself up, I'll tell you that. So it's easy to tell why I only ever do look at the positive side.  
  
But I guess in my looking so much at the positives, I tend to forget the negatives. Hell, I even go to extreme lengths to paint the world as a peachy happy go lucky place. But it's pretty easy to get the lines between vices and virtues blurred in a place like Vegas, where everythings pretty much a gray area. But some things exist in this city of blurs and grays that can turn everything into a fucking rainbow!

 

**Jon**

  
If this town got any one bit more filled with evil, and vices, then it'd turn into the 7th circle of hell. That's where the Sins of the Lion dwell. I try to stay on the right path as much as I can, and get everyone else on it, even if they've never been on it in life before. But it sure isn't easy! Every corner that you turn, there's just so many more things to get caught up in, and you lose your way so easily!  
  
To be entirely honest with you, I think the only reason I still live here in Vegas is because there's so many people that need to be saved from themselves. If it weren't for needing to save them, I would be living somewhere else, somewhere smaller, with less crime and violence, and _much_ less immorality.

**Spencer**

**  
**You need to be one of the best, or else you'll never make it to the top. You'll always be stuck in the undercurrent. That's one of the biggest problems with this city, but it can easily be an advantage to anyone who looks at it the right way. Most of them don't see it like that, but I do. I intend to use it to my advantage, and to hell with anyone who gets in my way. I will do anything to get to the top, even if it means subjecting my body to all the torments, and going days without sleep. Hell, I've been awake 4 solid days now, reading as much informational texts as I can, trying to become smarter than the rest of them. With my little helpers, maybe I can make it a whole week this time.

**Ryan**

**  
**This world is just a miserable place, and I'm just sick of it. It seems that nobody has a nice word for anyone else anymore, or even silence. Instead, it's the insults, the cruelty that I can't take. Why? I just get so sick of it sometimes. I wonder how humanity is surviving. Hell, I'm barely even surviving over here. So why prolong it? The scars are just increasing every day that goes by.

 

 

As you can see, this is the story of four boys, each of them struggling with the demons inside of himself. Who can tell which one will be able to realize that his life is falling down around him? And who of this little group, if any, will be able to save himself in time? And for the final question, the most important of all, which of you readers out there want to see the slow collapse of Panic! at the Disco?


	2. Pasts

**Ryan**

****  
've always been so easy to upset, from my youngest dayas. In childhood, when I got dropped off to daycare, or kindergarten, I used to cry for hours, just over my mother leaving me there. It didn't matter what anyone said or did, I kept crying, even though I knew that I would see her again in just a few short hours. In the beginning, I wasn't the only one. But shortly, the other kids outgrew it, in just a few weeks, yet I didn't.  
  
As I got older, it just got worse. You know all kids will slowly start becoming more malicious and cruel, taking on the views of their parents. In a group of toddlers, they won't fight and argue much, especially without cause. But as they get older, they hold grudges for nothing. So around the time they got to be about 6 or 7 years old, they did what all kids their age do. They started teasing other kids.   
  
Looking back now, I realize it wasn't anything to be upset over, but now I've experienced worse. But at the time when I had nothing to compare it to, it was as if they were throwing sticks and stones at me, verbally. I laugh now, thinking I used to be reduced to tears by such generic insults, like "meanie" or "poophead". Yeah, you know you've probably heard it or said it or both when you were in kindergarten. Don't look at me like that.   
  
In middle school, the new 'cool' word was 'gay'. It was 'Oh, you're so gay' or 'Bro, that's fuckin' gay!'. They said it without insult or even meaning it, like when these guys run around calling each other 'nigga'. The other kids were able to brush it off like nothing. Because it _was_ nothing. They knew that. But even though I knew it was just a childish way of trying to seem cool, I couldn't stop it from hurting me.   
  
Then it hurt even more when they started calling people a 'fag'. It was the same with 'gay', but to me it hurt more, because besides the fact that 'fag' is a more derogertory word, I was questioning at the time. Even worse than this was coming home to my alcoholic father. I got hell at school, and hell at home. And if I thought that they'd mature with time, they didn't. There were just more insults, and more nasty, vicious rumors abounding. Then, there was also the fact that I could look forward to getting beat up or shoved into a locker at least once a week.  
  
But I had my way of coping. Around the middle of 6th grade, I started running to a knife for comfort. When the bullying at school started to get physical, I quickly found out that my blades were my only friends. They were the only ones that I could trust. As a result, I went running to them in tears nearly every hour.   
  
Nobody questioned all the cuts I had, because they assumed it was just more effects of the bullying. I pity them for thinking like that, but I also thank them. Because if they had thought that something was up, I might've been carted away to a loony bin. I remember there were a few of these stories in highschool. There was this girl who tried to kill herself, so she got sent to a hospital. According to some people who talked to her sister, her sister said that she would most likely be there the rest of her life. Then there was this guy, anger issues, the lot. One day he got in this fight and got sent to a hospital for a while. Whatever pills they put him on, when he came back, he was just a shell, a zombie.  
  
And lastly, the one that hurt the most, is because I actually knew the person. The year before, she had gotten sent to a bunch of hospitals, because she used to scratch herself. It wasn't bad, deep cuts, just little scratches that'd vanish in a couple days, and she didn't do them that often. But someone apparently thought that she needed to be put on pills or some shit. She became a wreck of a person. The side effects from all those pills were awful. I don't think I ever want to see something like that happen again. Eventually, they took her off the pills, but the damage was done. Thanks to them, she now had some massive issues, trauma, and a record saying she was mentally unstable.   
  
While I didn't talk to her much, I did hear all the rumors that were going around. Then, my second year of highschool, her first, something happened. I'm not sure what, but apparently she had gotten sent to the hospital again. She got out, but when she did, her life went to hell. Pretty much everyone she had depended on had completely left her. And to top it off, they were treating her like shit, because it seemed that somehow or the other someone in authority had spilled the beans on it. Close to the end, she was a complete mess. She had gotten forced to go see this doctor, and they had said that she needed to be institutionalized, probably for years. Of course, she couldn't take that, so she took her own life instead.   
  
It shocked me, especially when one of the last of her friends who still stuck by her came up to me. It turns out that she had left a will of some sort, with a letter for me. It was pretty short. She just said that she was sorry that we couldn't have been closer, and she thanked me for at least still being nice to her at the end, when almost everyone else was an asshole. She told me to switch off my wrists, before they found me, because I didn't wanna get shit over it, but she'd prefer if I stop, so the same thing that happened to her wouldn't happen to me. Then she said while she didn't have anything that she could leave me, She said that she would watch over me from wherever the hell she went next.   
  
As I said, this bothered me, because I knew her. It bothered me even more, because I saw what they did to people like me and her. It was easy to understand now why I'm terrified of going anywhere near a hospital, or letting people know what I do. I don't want to go through any of that shit, even if I'm out of the school system now. I still don't have many people I can trust. But ever since that day over 10 years ago, I've never been without my knives.  
  
I am Ryan Ross, and this has been the fucked up story of my life.

**Brendon**

****  
Growing up in a Mormon home hasn't been easy. It was all Jesus, all the time. If some priest hadn't okayed it, it was assumed to be forbidden. It left me with a very empty life, pretty much anti-social as well. So you can probably bet the minute I turned 18 I was out the door for some fun.  
  
And you'd be right. I was. For years I never even came close to a social life. But now I had one, and when I was offered booze and drugs, having never tried them, and being forbidden to me as they were, I tried them in a heartbeat. When I realized it made people like me more, I just kept taking more and more. I'm such an attention whore after all.

**Jon**

****  
Can't you see the filth? All the human wreckage? The unwashed masses? The Godless people? They're everywhere. This city, this very earth, is crawling with them, save for small pockets of people like me, people devoted to God.  
  
Now the makes you wonder, why am I not living in a monastery, right? Or even more relevant, why am I living in the most Godless, lawless, vulgar, evil city on earth? And why am I, a man of God, not a preacher, but a musician, who isn't even in a Christian group, but rather a rock band?  
  
Simple! In a monastery, everyone's already devoted to God. There's no one left to save. I'd be pretty useless in there! That's also why I live in Las Vegas. Because it's so sinful, there's thousands in this city who need to be saved. That's the same reason that I'm not a nminister or priest, but a rock musician. I have more people looking up to me and emulating me, and reach a much wider audience.   
  
Oh, why am I like this? Well when I was a kid, I would go to church with my grandma. She pretty much raised me. I'm grateful, but regretful at the same time, Why? Because I found out that only believers go to heaven, and everyone else burns in hell. As a child, not only did I want to go to heaven, but I wanted everyone else to go there too. And when I found out how many people didn't believe, I made it my life's goals to convert as mny people as I could, so they wouldn't suffer in hell.

**Spencer**

****  
Ever since I could remember, I was always being pushed to do better. It was never a 'You're not good enough', it was more of a 'You can do better.', but it was still pushing me to the top. If I ever came home with a grade that was anything less than an 'A+', I was asked something along the lines of 'Why couldn't you get a better grade?', even if I had gotten the highest grades in my class.  
  
If I did get a perfect score, it was 'Why didn't you get any extra credit?' and if I did, it was never enough. Some time around my early teen years, I realized that practically everyone else around me was a complete moron. So I decided to compensate. I began to learn everything that I could, even if I wasn't interested in it.   
  
Soon, I began to realize that sleeping took time away from learning. Then I found out about some wonderful little pills, that can keep me awake for days on end, with perfect concentration. I absolutely loved them, and I still do. I intend to be the smartest person on this earth, in stark comparison to the scum known as the rest of humanity. And those little helpers of mine will get me there, one way or another.


End file.
